I published Understanding Sun Tzu on the
Art of War, and it shortly thereafter earns a Reviewer’s Choice Award
from the Small Press Review. The National Defense University and U.S. Naval
War College adopt the book for their curriculum. A separate project history
is available for this book at
www.artofwarsuntzu.com. This books has sold
several thousand copies.

May 2004

I finish the Art
of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck. Researching and writing this
proved nearly a year long project. I have little difficulty choosing a
design for the card deck. When I wrote the companion book, I had do decide
whether to go with a red base color or black base color. I chose red. That
left black. Conveying the product’s contents on the back, to include leaving
room for the bar code, proves the greater challenge. I originally choose to
shrink the bar code, but learned that could result in steep fines in
California of a scanner cannot read it. I choose “Which Card Will You Play?”
as the tag line for the back and show a couple examples of the cards.

September 2004

The proofing and
printing process manages to take three months. Product goes to
market. Most sales are done face-to-face. This card deck is quickly picked up by
several professional organizations, to include the following:

I sell a lot of these card deck directly.
In the public space this product has a slower start, but
now sells at the same pace as the book. Adding "Cards you play when it's
not a game" to the Web site gets things going.

October 2004

Conceive the idea to make an existing
assortment of sales training notes into a playing card
deck. I approach a very prominent sales training organization with the
idea to produce this deck, and send the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck
and the above as a sample. Although initially enthusiastic, the owner of
the training organization ultimately pushes back on the idea. I start
work on my own with the assistance of my father, a career salesperson from IBM
who served as a sales trainer for the IBM Sales Training School, and retains
many of his contacts from that organization.

October 2004 -
February 2005

Zion Bar-El, the
CEO of
Ideation International, asks if I can make a card deck for innovation along the
same lines as the Art of War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck. I have
some concern about diverting effort from the sales cards. I have reason
to believe that the organization I approached might run with the card idea on
their own. However, this represents a great project, and I decide it is
worth the risk.

This project lasts eight months. I complete the draft
of what is at first called the Inventive Solutions Card DeckTM as a joint venture with Ideation International. This
card deck is more extensive, 170 cards, and larger in size than the Art of
War: Sun Tzu Strategy Card Deck. I develop
games for this product title Solve ItTM
and Evolve ItTM
for this product. I also develop the game StratEffectsTM
for the Sun Tzu deck
that follows similar principles of the two. All three games encourage
players to consider all aspects of possible solutions to technical and
competitive challenges. In tests, they prove extremely effective for real
world problem solving.

May 2005

Launch new product
as Innovation PlannerTM.
It is the second in the card series. Information is available at
www.innovationplannercards.com.
Description as follows:

Innovation Planner™ is a card set of innovation
strategies and solutions used for rapid, effective, and efficient problem
solving and idea generation. It is based on the Ideation TRIZ innovation
methodology that was derived from the analysis
of over 3 million patents and 500 standard patterns of technical evolution.
Just as you can combine the 26 letters in the alphabet to produce all ranges
of literature, these cards describe the universal principles of invention that
innovators combine to create the millions of inventions known to mankind.

This product has lead to the development
of several patent pending products at major corporations.

May 2005 - June 2005

Work recommences in earnest on the sales
cards. The goal is to finish them by July 2005 - particularly because I
still have concern about the organization I approached "borrowing" the idea.
The threat that that will happen diminishes as the complexity of the project
increases.

During this period, I make more extensive contact with other
sales professionals, to include G.F. (Buck) Rodgers who was a key individual
in creating the IBM sales training school during IBM's heyday as a mainframe
computer seller. I am also invited to join the board of the United Sales
Professionals Association (UPSA). In June, I am asked by Landon IP, Inc.
to build an Intellectual Property Consulting service to include building the
sales department. The time that will take has much to do with targeting
July.

I also "adopt" for a time a couple of
young pigeons that I actually watch grow from egg to full grown birds.
After three months or so, I took this shot one morning. That afternoon,
the pigeons took their first flights and left the nest.

At the end of June, the project
seems done. When I finish any writing project, I read the entire document
into a tape recorder, and then listen. Upon listening, it's clear the
project is not done - not even close.

July 2005 - February 2006

Resume work on the sales cards, now with the
intent to complete them by the end of September 2005. This proves completely
unrealistic as well. The project is the most difficult and intensive writing I have
ever undertaken. Revisions number in the hundreds. The vacation
pictured above in December 2005 was scheduled to be a celebration of project completion.
It proves a great vacation, but I find myself still working on the text on the beach between dives.
The dives are how a prefer to remember the period, but it actually
involved a lot of Starbuck's time that does not make an exciting a
photo.

The last shot was a welcome snow that
gave me an entire day to work without interference.

January 2006 -
Seminars etc.

All three card
decks lead to seminars invitations across the country. The first picture
is the coffee table where much of the later writing and editing was done.
The seminars were made it fun in the between time. Pictured center is the post
conference from the Pi Sigma Epsilon Sales & Marketing conference in
Minneapolis given to students and young professionals as pictured here. The second is a meeting for LESI (Licensing Executive
Society International) at the Center Club of
Baltimore given to about fifty mostly lawyers.

Because Center For Advantage does not have the marketing
might of a Random House or Wiley, it has been my contention that Center For
Advantage products must be literally perfect to have any chance at success.
With three successes under my belt in accord with that philosophy, including a
book that has already sold as many copies as most non-fiction titles do that
come from powerhouse publishers, a standard of perfection was the target for
The Sales Strategy Fundamentals. It was more difficult to achieve
that perfection then with the previous projects because sales has so many
experts with so many varied opinions. I wanted universal agreement on
the selected fundamentals and their presentation from the dozens of
professionals involved in reviewing the project.

So week after week, I wrote, rewrote, tested, knowing that
at some point, I would have that read through and know the project was finally
done. This finally happened on February 14th, 2006. Then, for the
fourth time, I called the printer and asked for an updated quote, and for the
second time, said, "I really mean it this time, it's done." Files went
out for proofs shortly after.

The attached photo was the view from the living room on one
of the first days post completion.

June 4, 2006

First sales cards are
delivered. It took some time to figure out the cover art used on the box
and card backs. We decide on
the simple design above. When viewed two dimensionally, the arrow is the
traditional left to right rise in sales. When viewed three dimensionally,
the figure represents the multi-dimensional aspects of strategy.

March 30, 2009

After three years of work, the new book
Outpacing the Competition will be published by John Wiley & Sons. This
book includes the sales fundamentals as one of three important legs of a
comprehensive business strategy that involves innovation, business
advancement, and security.